Adil Mardinoglu is a SciLifeLab fellow and the newest addition to the Protein Atlas team of principal investigators. He is the leader of the systems biology group, a group that create biological networks to identify drug targets and discover biomarkers for the development of efficient treatment strategies.

But Adil´s background is not in medicine, he is an electronic engineer with a PhD in computational biology.

– I did my PhD in Ireland where I worked with magnetic drug targeting, he says.

After a one year post doc doing research on neuronal networks, Adil Mardinoglu moved to Chalmers in Gothenburg to join Jens Nielsens group in systems biology...Read more

In a recent publication in Nucleic Acids Research, researchers from the Systems Biology group at the Human Protein Atlas investigated anomalies in regulation of lipid metabolism in the liver, in association with hepatocellular carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma has a high mortality rate and early detection of the disease is crucial for the application of effective treatment strategies. Several lines of evidence imply that lipid anomalies underlie the hepatocellular carcinoma pathogenesis.

Here, the researchers applied a tailored network-based approach to identify signaling hubs associated with regulation of this part of the metabolism...Read more

In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports last week, researchers from the Human Protein Atlas describe a method for stratification of responders towards the drug eculizumab that allows for precision medicine and should be applicable to several other diseases and therapeutics.

The term precision medicine describes the idea of providing effective treatment based on a patient´s molecular make up. Recent advances in molecular diagnostic tools and handling of large data sets allow for the stratification of patients based on e.g. genetic or protein information and make it possible to provide tailored treatment for these sub-groups...Read more

This week, the image of the week highlights the Golgi apparatus. This week's contribution is brought to us by Peter Thul, a postdoctoral researcher who works on the Subcellular protein atlas, and specializes in understanding secretory pathway.

The Golgi apparatus was discovered by the Italian physician and scientist Camillo Golgi, who discovered the fine membraneous structure in 1898 (Mazzarello P., Garbarino C., & Calligaro A. 2009). Since then it has frequently drawn the attention of researcher because of its prominent role in the secretory pathway of cells.

The secretory pathway describes the route that proteins take to get to the outside of the cell...Read more

Though frequently overlooked as being a "catch-all" for proteins that don't reside within another organelle, cytoplasmic proteins are anything but.

One important role of proteins in the cytoplasm is the regulation of gene expression. There are two main ways in which gene expression is regulated; when converting the genetic code in your DNA to RNA (transcription), and when converting RNA to proteins (translation). Though transcription (DNA to RNA) occurs in the nucleus, cytoplasmic proteins are often involved in activating transcription factors which then move to the nucleus to perform transcription.

The protein stained in Fig 1...Read more